


You Were Out There and You Found Me

by nonisland



Series: What's the Future, Who Will Choose It [1]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Familial Violence, Castlevania Is Its Own Warning, Episode: s01e01 Witchbottle, Episode: s01e04 Monument, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Loneliness, Parent-Child Relationship, Prophecy, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23454304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: A few of the stories about the Sleeper Awakened name Greșit as the Sleeper’s resting place. When he was fourteen and desperately bored and pretending he wasn’t, also, lonely, Adrian had started building a space of his own, and he had chosen Greșit for reasons he hadn’t been willing to admit.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Lisa (Castlevania), Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Trevor Belmont & Sypha Belnades
Series: What's the Future, Who Will Choose It [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705684
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	You Were Out There and You Found Me

**Author's Note:**

> One line of dialogue is taken from the first episode of the show. Title from Dar Williams’s “Are You Out There”. Many thanks to [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist), who looked this over for me; any remaining errors are wholly mine.
> 
> * * *

In his younger days, Adrian had never questioned why his father had a collection of stories about the Sleeper Awakened when he had little interest in any other aspect of Wallachian folklore. It was enough, surely, that the stories were there, and that Adrian was permitted to read them.

They were stories about three friends, who stood at each other’s sides even in the face of death: the sleeping soldier, and the hunter, and the scholar. They were brave and kind and good, and in spite of that they were all so alone without each other.

Adrian had been young and lonely—his father was both kind and generous, and his mother was wonderful as the sun in springtime, but human parents drew their children away from his smile and…well, if there had ever been any other children like him, he never met them. The idea of _friends_ had been enough to keep him going back to the Sleeper Awakened book, page upon page in his father’s spiked and sprawling handwriting bound neatly together.

He had just…he had never questioned it. There were few enough adventure stories, or stories of friendship, in his father’s library, and his mother wasn’t in the habit of reading for pleasure. Adrian took the gift unthinkingly.

* * *

The crash of wood and metal interrupts Adrian’s grief.

He had known—he had always known—that his mother ran risks doing as she did, but somehow that knowledge had never meant that she could _die_. That he would never see her again. That she would be gone, and that there had been nothing he could do to stop it, because of spite and jealousy.

He wants to stay where he is, curled up around his memories as if he can keep them, but his father should know he isn’t alone even now. Adrian dries his eyes and follows the sounds of destruction, the roars of pain, the high shattering of priceless glass.

* * *

Adrian’s mother had never liked the Sleeper Awakened stories.

She had never tried to stop him from reading them, but it hadn’t been her way to keep knowledge from anyone. He had known, from the way she frowned, but he had never understood.

“They’re heroes,” he had said. “They fight evil; they make people safe.”

“I know,” she had answered, smiling sadly as she’d touched the closely-written pages. “But Adrian, my own, you can’t fight evil if there’s no evil to fight. Wouldn’t it be a better world if nobody _needed_ a hero?”

He had been young, bold with his own fearlessness. He hadn’t known. “I suppose,” he had said, and he’d been lying at the time.

Now, hearing his father swear to destroy all human life in his mother’s memory, Adrian understands, and wishes he didn’t. His father had studied the Sleeper as he studied the Belmonts—as he studied poison and fire—as he studied every other threat to him, Vlad Dracula Țepeș. And his mother had known.

“I won’t let you do it,” Adrian says, and marvels that his voice can be this steady. “I grieve with you, but I won’t let you commit genocide.”

His father snarls and turns on him, faster than Adrian has ever seen him move. Adrian starts to draw his sword, but his father has blurred across the room, and then the pain comes, white-hot, blinding, as Adrian’s blood sprays scarlet through the air.

His father’s hands are dripping with it.

Adrian realizes, as the edges of his vision darken, that he drew his sword—tried to draw his sword, slowed by his human half—on his own father, without thinking about it. That some part of his mind had already believed his father to be a mortal threat to him.

He would be dead by now, surely, if his father’s claws had ripped across his heart itself. Surely.

* * *

A few of the stories about the Sleeper Awakened name Greșit as the Sleeper’s resting place. When he was fourteen and desperately bored and pretending he wasn’t, also, lonely, Adrian had started building a space of his own, and he had chosen Greșit for reasons he hadn’t been willing to admit.

It all started there, in the stories. Three strangers met, and tied their lives together. Two of them fell in love, probably; the stories were a little unclear on that, and Adrian had pretended he didn’t care. He didn’t have time for romance, he decided. He didn’t need—he didn’t need—

But that kind of lasting companionship. To be able to know for the rest of his life that he had been part of something with someone else. He wouldn’t need to marry for that, only to find someone who didn’t mind either his vampire or his human half. He _had_ been ashamed of choosing Greșit, as if by setting up a den in the echoing underbelly of the city he could conjure up friends for himself, too, but he hadn’t been ashamed enough to find some other catacombs to build from.

So it had gone for years, as he refined his plans and salvaged old bits of his father’s castle, and his father coaxed him through the equations, and his mother watched them and smiled while she made her tinctures and studied the new plants his father brought her from far-off lands.

* * *

Adrian is dizzy, sick, possibly dying. His mother is dead; his father is gone.

(He will have to kill his father.)

He flees to Greșit, to the lair he’d built when he only thought he was lonely, and realizes with a horrible sobbing laugh that leaves him tasting his own blood that he will _become_ the Sleeper.

And then he does sleep. He has the ability to dream, but he doesn’t. Or, at least, he dreams without oblivion; he dreams knowing what has been and what will have to be. After some time—he doesn’t know how long—the pain fades, and the dreams blur, and he floats in the darkness, waiting.

It’s his defenses that wake him, and he sizes up the wanderers who have stumbled into his lair, bickering the whole while: a tattered and grubby man with a shortsword by his side and a whip coiled at his belt, and a small woman in a Speaker’s robes.

 _Hm_ , Adrian thinks, and challenges them.

* * *

Adrian is no one’s savior.

* * *

Trevor Belmont, last son of the House of Belmont, tries to kill him, of course. The interesting thing is that he almost succeeds. The even more interesting thing is that the woman, Sypha, very nearly _does_ kill Adrian, and only his mission, not his skill, stops her.

Adrian realizes two things: firstly, that if he is the Sleeping Soldier—as he must be—then the Hunter and the Scholar are _his_ friends. And secondly, that in all his years of imagining friendships that close, that deep, that enduring, he would never have intended to imagine Belmont and Sypha.

Especially Belmont.

But here they are with a darkness upon the land: a vampire hunter and a Speaker magician and Adrian himself, newly-awakened, still weak with sleep.

* * *

Adrian’s mother had tried to help him make friends. For her, that hadn’t meant trying to change him; it had meant arguing passionately with the families of other children about his age.

“He’s such a kind boy,” she’d said, so often he can still hear her voice now. He wasn’t supposed to have listened, but at first she hadn’t realized how good his hearing is. And often she’d go on, “Just give him a _chance_ ; he’s never harmed anyone. If he’d never had any teeth grow in at all you wouldn’t blame him for that. It’s not fair to blame him for this.”

He will try to—to save the people of Wallachia for her. He can try, quietly, carefully, to give Belmont and Sypha a chance too.


End file.
